Group project

Well, the group project has finally finished! It went a lot better than I expected, to be honest I expected some falling out, but it went smoothly. Our final level, is ok, I think some of the other groups are a lot better . Apparently this has been a very good year.

We pretty much made what we set out to make. At the start we were told not to get out of hand with the Imagineering, but some of the other groups went crazy with it and made excellent levels. Ours still looks a lot like the queens building though, and seeing as we basically knew next to nothing about UDK at the start, I'm happy with what we made. I've got the basics of the program now, and it will be exciting to be able to make something of my own, and be able to run through it. There is something a lot more motivating about being able to see your finished assets in a game engine.

On a small side note, I also understand a lot more about how to texture. Seeing how the light effected things in UDK helped me understand why you should paint everything with no shadows. Before I was focusing with what looked good in 3ds max, but now I understand a lot more.

I'm not going to go into detail about how people did in our group, I'll leave that for the feedback sheets. The main problem we had was organisation; we had no clear roles, and that lead to a bit of disorganisation. Each member was pretty organised about getting their own work done, but when it came to meetings it was difficult. Stuff would be said, but things would not get organised. With a team leader, an art director ect ect, it would have been a lot easier to keep everyone on the same page.

Myself, I think I mad enough assets, and worked as hard as I could on this project. It took a little while to get used to things like collision boxes though. I think I learnt a lot working on this project, and I defiantly learnt that I can make objects a lot faster than I thought. Its made me speed up my asset modelling a lot. It seems a bit crazy that in the first year it took me three weeks to model a bin.

There could have been a few more tutorials available on blackboard. Some of the third years showed us some basics, but there is nothing on the basics on blackboard, such as making a bsp block out, which would have been very helpful. The meetings we where meant to have each week on Thursday with Mike stopped as well, which was ok, but it felt like we were not getting much feedback.

As I want to be an environment artist, I'm going to work on some environments of my own. I've got a few ideas than I'm going to work on in the last semester. I've also still got to put all my assets in a room in UDK which I'll be working on this week. Formative assessments go moved to this Friday, so I shall post up my review of my second year after that. Anyway, this is a lot of words, so here's a lot of pictures of the finished level.